Well, here’s a bold new strategy in the wake of the June 27 debate debacle that has Democrats calling, louder than ever, for President Joe Biden to step aside as their presidential nominee in the 2024 election: Biden telling donors that he’s simply over having discussions about it.
In a recording of a Monday call between the president and his donors obtained by Politico, Biden told them that he’s “done talking about the debate” and that the attention should be focused on his presumptive Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump.
Sure. Because that’ll work.
“We need to move forward. Look, we have roughly 40 days til the convention, 120 days til the election. We can’t waste any more time being distracted,” Biden told donors, according to the report.
“I have one job, and that’s to beat Donald Trump,” he added. “I’m absolutely certain I’m the best person to be able to do that.
“So we’re done talking about the debate. It’s time to put Trump in a bull’s-eye.”
The move was aimed at three classes of people who insist on continuing to talk about the debate: donors, the Democrats and the media.
In terms of the donors, they might be the toughest in the equation, considering that donations were already down before the great debate debacle of 2024.
A report exactly one week prior by CNBC noted that data shared by Biden’s camp showed the president’s re-election campaign and the Democratic National Committee had raised $85 million combined in May. That total was completely eclipsed by the $141 million Trump and the Republican National Committee had raised combined during the same period.
Is Joe Biden senile?
Days before the debate, Politico noted that Biden’s “allies are bracing for a slugfest without the benefit of a fatter wallet, as financial reports showed Trump outraising Biden in back-to-back months, hauling in huge sums after his 34 felony convictions and erasing Biden’s longstanding financial edge.”
Clearly, donors aren’t going to be impressed by the debate performance or the campaign’s scrambling measures afterward. A Monday article in The Wall Street Journal included numerous reports of donor frustrations with Biden’s inner circle concealing the true state of the president’s health from them.
And then there are the Democrats. A steady trickle of reports of defections and open calls for Biden to step aside have turned into a low drumbeat, at the very least.
The number of on-the-record Democrats calling for his ouster has grown, and the number of those in leadership who are questioning Biden’s candidacy or calling for the president to step aside behind closed doors is growing and includes names such as Sen. Patty Murray of Washington and Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York.
Aimed at tackling these voices, the Biden campaign put out an open letter to Democrats on Monday, several hours before the recording of the call was made public by Politico, emphasizing many of the same themes.
“We had a Democratic nomination process and the voters have spoken clearly and decisively,” Biden said in the letter. (Or, one suspects, someone else wrote in a letter Biden signed later, with staff getting his John Hancock by convincing the president he had to sign a check for the Girl Scout cookies he’d bought for the rest of the White House staff after his attention started to wander three paragraphs into reading the thing to him. It’s almost two pages, after all.)
“This was a process open to anyone who wanted to run. Only three people chose to challenge me,” he said of Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips, self-help guru Marianne Williamson and environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“One fared so badly that he left the primaries to run as an independent,” the letter said. “Another attacked me for being too old and was soundly defeated. The voters of the Democratic Party have voted. They have chosen me to be the nominee of the party.
“Do we now just say that this process didn’t matter? That the voters don’t have a say?”
Biden seems to think this question is rhetorical, but he wouldn’t be writing this letter if it were.
This morning, I sent a letter to my fellow Democrats on Capitol Hill. In it, I shared my thoughts about this moment in our campaign.
It’s time to come together, move forward as a unified party, and defeat Donald Trump. pic.twitter.com/ABtAaJrr0n
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) July 8, 2024
However, this isn’t as blunt as Biden saying he’s “done talking about the debate.” Which is funny, too, because the media — which one sometimes confuses with the Democrats but occasionally will collectively take on the task of taking on a Democrat — is continuing to persist in talking about the debate and the fallout from it, including whether the president has had any cognitive tests and why a specialist in Parkinsonism has visited the White House on numerous occasions in 2024:
🚨 Absolute CHAOS erupts in the briefing room as Karine Jean-Pierre repeatedly declines to say why a renown Parkinson’s expert has visited the Biden White House so many times in recent months pic.twitter.com/LNOsHE1hFr
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 8, 2024
Karine Jean-Pierre admits a neurologist HAS visited Biden at the White House pic.twitter.com/eqBSUr2kE7
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 8, 2024
REPORTER: Why won’t Biden just take a cognitive exam and put all this to rest if he has nothing to hide?
KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: “I hear you” pic.twitter.com/hZtouKCIza
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 8, 2024
So apparently, Biden is done talking about the debate — and with it, his obvious agedness — before even the media is.
This feels a bit like Richard Nixon telling the press how he was finished talking about Watergate long before Watergate had finished with him.
Biden also thanked the donors for the “grassroots support” he saw during his post-debate tour.
“I appreciate you hanging in there with me. I realize you’re getting a lot of heat,” he said.
However, one anonymous donor on the call said she was hearing, at best, ambivalence from those with deep pockets.
“I’m hearing from a lot of people who think he should get out, and I’m not getting a whole lot of ‘he should stay in,’” the donor said. “I’ve also had people tell me, ‘I’m not giving anymore.’”
When these are the donors on the call speaking, you can bet that the rest of America — and the world — isn’t playing along with Joe Biden and pretending that reality doesn’t exist.
